I would like to thank all KDE translators who were involved. Their work is very much appreciated!

Packages:
There are packages for most major distributions (i.e. Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu). Please take a look at the Downloads page.

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/grub2-editor-v0-6-4/feed/3Gentoo-Fu: Optimizing the build processhttps://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/gentoo-fu-optimizing-the-build-process/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/gentoo-fu-optimizing-the-build-process/#commentsSat, 25 Aug 2012 11:02:39 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=495Continue reading →]]>This is another Gentoo post, not strictly related to KDE, but a follow-up to my previous post, building KDE branches (such as 4.9 and master). Ccache can greatly reduce the build time for these constantly updated packages, but here I’ll present some other tips & tricks. These optimizations are applied system-wide and will therefore improve the build process for all packages, not just live/KDE-specific.

These optimizations are backed up by testing data which I myself performed on my system (Intel Core i5 3570K @ 3.40 GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333Mhz) in a proper environment (each run was performed after a cold boot to avoid any unwanted caching by the OS). The following optimizations were tested:

Moving the build directory to RAM (tmpfs)

Quiet build (redirect build output to log files)

Building multiple packages at once

Performing debug-less builds

Another possible optimization is setting emerge’s niceness to a more appropriate level, but I didn’t get around to testing it.

Building from RAM & Quiet Builds

The first test was timing the build process for kdelibs (without ccache and after a cold boot as explained above). It includes the first two optimizations in order to create a nice comparison table (HDD/RAM building and --quiet-build=y/n). Furthermore this test was conducted both in a non-accelerated KMS console (booting in single-user mode) and in an accelerated X-console (Konsole in a KDE session).

Before dumping the results, I will explain how the used optimizations were achieved:

So we actually mount a tmpfs instance over /var/tmp/portage (portage’s default build path), assign proper read/write privileges to the ‘portage’ user and group (preserving the original mode bits) and set a maximum size of 75% of your RAM. As a side note, tmpfs mounts act as a stack: when you umount this tmpfs instance, the original /var/tmp/portage contents will be revealed underneath (more information in this excellent article). Setting the appropriate permissions is quite straight-forward; I have just retained the original values. Lastly, setting a size of 75% of your RAM ups the default value of 50% (useful for packages with a large code base – i.e. chromium). You really shouldn’t set ‘size=0’ (i.e. disable size restrictions): a memory-hungry build will irreversibly hog and crash your machine instead of getting killed for running out of memory (more information in the above article and in the kernel’s following file: Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt). This isn’t very cool: I did this with a chromium debug build on RAM and the kernel eventually crashed!

I would also advise you to enable the “fail-clean” FEATURE in your /etc/make.conf to free valuable space in your RAM when a build fails.

Quiet build (redirect build output to log files):

You can enable quiet builds by appending --quiet-build=y to emerge’s arguments. By default it is set to ‘n’. To make it permanent, just append it to the EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS variable in /etc/make.conf.

Before proceeding, you should also set PORT_LOGDIR="/var/log/portage" in /etc/make.conf to redirect the build output to log files in this directory, otherwise the build output is simply lost. This way you lose no functionality, you can always monitor the build output from another virtual console.

Lastly, the “clean-logs” FEATURE will periodically delete old build logs (older than one week by default).

So, having explained the optimizations used, I will present the test data. The test was run only once in each configuration but is quite representative:

Non-accelerated console:

HDD build: 10m 3.707s

RAM build: 9m 52.246s

HDD+quiet build: 8m 35.364s

RAM+quiet build: 8m 22.819s

Accelerated console:

HDD build: 8m 47.189

RAM build: 8m 33.321s

HDD+quiet build: 8m 35.187s

RAM+quiet build: 8m 23.945s

Obviously the non-accelerated console lags considerably when printing the build output. Other than that, a RAM build saves you ~12s in this case, plus considerably less HDD spinning noises. A quiet build gives another 10s speedup. It’s really not that great a speedup, but both optimizations are easily applied, so why not have them?

Building multiple packages at once

For this test, I timed the build process for amarok, k3b, kdevelop and ktorrent in a single run. Same conditions as above, with RAM+quiet build enabled in a KMS console. This test was quite straightforward: the only thing changing was the number of parallel jobs that portage was processing (-j emerge argument):

1 parallel job (-j1): 9m 9.950s

2 parallel jobs (-j2): X 8m 9.904s

3 parallel jobs (-j3): 8m 7.315s

Unlimited(=4) parallel jobs (-j): X 8m 10.261s

X denotes a build failure due to the compiler crashing. So, although it brought some nice speed improvements, I wouldn’t recommend running multiple jobs due to instability. I guess this is more oriented towards distcc/multiprocessor-powered systems.

Performing debug-less builds

This is not really an optimization; I included it mainly for comparison to the debug builds above and to lay out the procedure of enabling per-package debug-less builds. This can be really useful for certain packages (such as chromium) which fail to build in-RAM due to memory shortage (debug builds are extremely memory-consuming).

So the only test done here was building amarok, k3b, kdevelop and ktorrent (as above), with RAM+quiet build enabled in a KMS console, one parallel job, after disabling debug symbols generation (explained below). The result is 7m 47.164s. I actually expected this to be lower, but it seems that debug builds are not that time-consuming after all.

To enable debug symbol generation (extensive article here) I have “-ggdb” in my CFLAGS variable in /etc/make.conf and “compressdebug splitdebug” in the FEATURES variable. This generates debug symbols for all installed packages (located under /usr/lib/debug).

To disable debug symbol generation you have to make a per-package configuration (a list of excluded packages from the debug configuration mentioned above). Create /etc/portage/package.env and add the following line (chromium used as an example):

www-client/chromium nodebug.conf

We inform portage that the www-client/chromium package will be installed with the configuration variables listed in /etc/portage/env/nodebug.conf. The contents of this file are the following:

CFLAGS here is exactly the same as in /etc/make.conf, excluding “-ggdb”. So, you get the idea. Another good use of per-package environment variables, related to this post, is specifying a different build directory (which is not on RAM). Instructions here.

Conclusion

All in all, no optimization will yield more than a few seconds speedup. However, after running all these tests, I have permanently enabled RAM+quiet builds. Performing the build from RAM makes way more sense: you keep HDD activity at a minimum so that other I/O processes can run in parallel without considerable lagging, you get a lot less noise, plus a small boost in the build times. Same goes for quiet builds which bring only advantages (you can always monitor the build output from another virtual console as explained above).

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/gentoo-fu-optimizing-the-build-process/feed/7Gentoo-Fu: Building KDE brancheshttps://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/gentoo-fu-building-kde-branches/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/gentoo-fu-building-kde-branches/#commentsFri, 17 Aug 2012 10:50:01 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=433Continue reading →]]>Being a happy Gentoo user myself for about half a year, I thought I would share some tips from my personal experiences on this great distro. It’s nothing you cannot already google for; these are just some ideas/motives to further dig into for yourselves. Mayhaps I will write another post or two about Gentoo. If I ever decide to overcome my laziness Take it easy with this post, it’s a bit lengthy, but to quote Blaise Pascal: “I haven’t had time to make it shorter yet“.

Gentoo being a source-based distribution allows for some very cool stuff like building from an upstream git branch. You can find ebuilds for KDE branches 4.9 and master (as of 17.08.2012), which can vastly help you with bug triaging/fixing. Bug triaging is as easy as updating your system from this branch and trying to reproduce bugs (the procedure is fully automated thanks to Portage’s Moo Powers – “emerge --moo” – and the Gentoo Developers). Bug fixing is as easy as writing a patch and applying it using Portage’s excellent patching abilities. I actually *fixed* a bug like this recently (Bug #297209), being too lazy to manually pull and compile the source code. Sure, a manual setup is way more flexible, but doesn’t come without quite some hassles.

These ebuilds are available from overlays [1] and there is a full-blown guide on how to install KDE from these ebuilds [2]. I won’t go into much detail here, these guides are more than enough; I will simply mention what the situation is like on my system. Actually I will simply quote my system updating process (it slowly builds into a ritual the more you delve into Gentoo) and more details will pop up in time:

Now, this is a beast of command line options. All over the net you will find references to -uDNav (I think it has almost become Gentoo’s “sudo apt-get upgrade”), but I have spiced it with some extra options. I will go shortly through these but “man emerge” is the way to go.

-u is shorthand for --upgrade. It pulls the latest versions of the packages specified – here we specified the @world set which is laid out in your world file [3]. In other words, these are your explicitly installed packages (all the other installed packages are dependencies to these).

-D is shorthand for --deep. It takes into consideration the whole dependency tree of the packages specified, not just their immediate dependencies. Without this you would only be updating the packages specified in the @world set along with their immediate dependencies.

-N is shorthand for --newuse. It takes into consideration packages that may not have new versions but whose USE flags have changed since last compilation. After meddling with USE in /etc/make.conf or /etc/portage/package.use, I always issue this update command to rebuild packages as necessary.

-a is shorthand for --ask. Always include this option (or -p/--pretend instead), otherwise Portage will move on without confirmation. You don’t want that.

-v is shorthand for --verbose. A little verbosity is always nice

-b is shorthand for --buildpkg. Just before installing a package, this option creates a binary package out of it and stores it in /usr/portage/packages/. It may hurt a bit your compilation times and your disk’s free space, but it comes in really handy if you move back and forth KDE’s branches like me. When I was testing my patch in multiple branches (4.8, 4.9, master) recently, the effort+time to switch between them was minimal. But this requires the next option:

-k is shorthand for --usepkg. Practically it instructs Portage to use binary packages created with -b, to [greatly] shorten compilation times.

–with-bdeps=y updates the build dependecies too. These are normally not included, Portage needs to be explictly told to do so, and I use it merely because I want a fully updated system (improves my Gentoo Feng-Shui).

So practically -uDNav is the de facto update command in Gentoo and -bk allows for using binary packages (which is really great: it never hurts to have some binary packages laying around, you never know when you’ll need them – especially useful when downgrading).

# FEATURES="ccache" smart-live-rebuild -E -- -av1b

This is where the fancy stuff happen. Ebuilds from the kde overlay pull the source code straight from KDE’s Git and Subversion repositories, but have a fixed version (e.g. the ebuilds from the 4.9 branch all have a version of 4.9.49.9999). This is not really cool because their version remains the same all the time and the update command I mentioned above won’t update these ebuilds. You either have to manually re-emerge these packages (after manually monitoring the source code repositories for commits – zero coolness points) or install a tool to monitor the remote git repositories for commits since the last time you compiled and update the packages as necessary. So, you need smart-live-rebuild (available in Gentoo’s official repos).

It will record the commit from which you built last time and in the future won’t rebuild this package unless a newer commit has occured. Extra coolness points. But it wouldn’t be that cool if it wasn’t combined with the preceding FEATURES=”ccache” (there is an official tutorial about configuring ccache for your reading pleasure [4]). I have configured it with a 5GB cache over here but I only use it for live ebuilds which need frequent re-compiling. ccache will slow down the first compilation a bit but future compilations will be blazing fast, which is the key to maintaining a fully updated installation from a KDE branch.

Command line options explained:

–E is shorthand for --no-erraneous-merge. Simply don’t emerge packages for which the update has failed.

— terminates the smart-live-rebuild options. Any remaining options will be directly passed on to emerge.

–av1b we have gone through this. -1 stands for --oneshot and it won’t append the packages emerged to your world file [3]. Since these packages are already installed, you only wish to update them. -1 is definitely not necessary here as smart-live-rebuild explicitly includes --oneshot on its own. I include it for symmetry with the next command.

On the other hand, smart-live-rebuild is not that smart. KDE’s infrastructure often contains multiple packages in a single repository and a change to one will make smart-live-rebuild rebuild all the packages from this repository. For instance a change to ksmserver (which is a package contained in the kde-workspace Git repo) will rebuild *all* packages residing in this repo. Still, better than nothing

# emerge -ca; emerge -Pa; revdep-rebuild -- -av1b

This is my post-update command. It checks for unneeded packages and removes them as necessary. -c is shorthand for --depclean. -P on the other hand stands for --prune and is of similar use to –depclean, but to be honest, it hasn’t occured to me yet that –prune detects an unneeded package that –depclean hasn’t already detected. I include it for Feng-Shui reasons (it’s a fast operation so no big deal).

revdep-rebuild is another must-have tool for any sensible Gentoo user; it detects broken references to libraries (i.e. when updating to newer versions of libraries) and rebuilds packages as needed. Its command line options are explained above. Make a habit of running revdep-rebuild after every update command in order to avoid system breakage!

# eclean-dist -dn; eclean-pkg; emaint -f all

Lastly, my system maintainance command. It removes old dist files (a.k.a. source code tarballs used for emerging) along with old binary packages. Default behavior is to keep the files from packages whose version still exists in the Portage tree (as newer versions roll out, old versions are removed from the Portage tree). This can take a hell of a time for dist files because it checks the entire Portage tree several times! -dn greatly reduces this time by only keeping installed versions. This is great for a rebuild but no good for downgrading. But since you have created binary packages for previous versions, you don’t have to recompile in order to downgrade! So, problem effectively solved

emaint checks for all kinds of problems in your installation and tries to -fix them. Nifty small utility.

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/grub2-editor-v0-5-8/feed/0GRUB2/BURG Integration in KDEhttps://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/grub2burg-integration-in-kde/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/grub2burg-integration-in-kde/#commentsSun, 29 Jan 2012 00:26:09 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=347Continue reading →]]>No, you’re not having a déjà vu, this is my second post about GRUB2/BURG support for KDM which shows up in PlanetKDE. I am sorry to abuse the planet for publicity, but I have seen quite a bit of confusion as to how KDE should be configured in order to interface with GRUB2/BURG and I would like to get some things straight.

What follows is a step-by-step guide describing how to configure KDE in order to automatically select a GRUB2/BURG entry other than the default when rebooting:

Shutdown Dialog

If you are a GRUB2 user skip the BURG instructions and vice versa.

Step 1. Inform GRUB2/BURG that you plan to use this feature:

GRUB2 instructions:

Open /etc/default/grub in the text editor of your preference (as root) and add the following:

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved

In case a GRUB_DEFAULT option already exists, just set it to “saved”.

BURG instructions:

Edit /etc/default/burg instead. The variable name is the same (GRUB_DEFAULT).

Step 2. Update your GRUB2/BURG menu file:

GRUB2 instructions:

The menu configuration file must contain set default=”${saved_entry}”. You are highly discouraged to manually edit this file, so execute the following command (as root):

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Please note that some distributions (i.e. Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE) use a slightly different naming scheme for GRUB2. So you’d have to adjust the above to the following:

Same rule as above applies here: if the burg-reboot binary is not located under /sbin/, locate it with “which burg-reboot”.

Step 5. Reboot!

That’s it, you’re done! Now either reboot or restart KDM (something like “/etc/init.d/kdm restart”) and you’re all set

As a side note, GRUB2 Editor (supports BURG) automatically adjusts your configuration to the above (i.e. it automatically performs steps 1 and 2).

Feel free to link to this post in linux forums as a reference. All of the above refer to KDE >= 4.7.

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/grub2burg-integration-in-kde/feed/15GRUB2 Editor v0.5.5https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/grub2-editor-v0-5-5/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/grub2-editor-v0-5-5/#commentsMon, 09 Jan 2012 15:43:10 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=218Continue reading →]]>GRUB2 Editor received another bugfix release today. This is mostly a boring release: no fancy new features so you may as well skip reading.

Are you unable to boot your Linux installation because you accidentally installed Windows after Linux? No problem! Boot from a Live CD of your Linux distribution, install the GRUB2 Editor using one of the many provided packages and restore GRUB in just a couple of seconds. It’s really easy! (More info)

Disable memtest entries:

Disable memtest entries

You may now further customise your GRUB2 menu by selecting whether or not memtest entries will be generated.

Translations:

In this release you will also find translations for the following languages, thanks to the corresponding KDE translation teams:

Danish

German

Estonian

Hungarian

Dutch

Portuguese

Portuguese (Brazil)

Swedish

Ukrainian

Other features:

Other new features include:

Warn the user when trying to uninstall the current kernel.

Manually find missing configuration files which are needed.

Recover initial settings (undoes all changes performed by this tool).

I estimate that the next release will be in about 2 months from now, due to restraining schedule.

As always you may get binary packages for most major distributions (Arch, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Ubuntu) from our KDE-Apps.org page. Enjoy

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/grub2-bootloader-editor-v0-5-0/feed/5Recovering GRUB (The Easy Way)https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/recovering-grub-the-easy-way/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/recovering-grub-the-easy-way/#commentsFri, 06 May 2011 22:51:19 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=110Continue reading →]]>It’s well past midnight over here so I’ll try to keep it short. I will present you a new feature of the GRUB2 Editor: recovering GRUB (from a Live CD). A new feature that hopefully many user-friendly distributions will adore because it bypasses the intimidating console when trying to recover GRUB, for example when installing Windows after your Linux distribution; an action that will erase GRUB from the MBR(=Master Boot Record) and render your Linux setup unbootable. I’ll let some screenshots do the talking:

Live CD Welcome Screen

Recover Screen

Installing(=Recovering) GRUB

Job Done!

So, firstly you are presented with two options when launching the GRUB Editor from a Live CD (screenshot #1); choosing the recovery option provides you with a list of detected partitions along with some information to help you determine where your previous installation resides (screenshot #2), picking a partition and Applying will initiate the installation process (screenshot #3) which will hopefully lead you to screenshot #4.

This post was published in hoping for feedback before making the next release (which will happen anytime soon). So any suggestions/insults are more than welcome

PS: Screenshots and testing done on a Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Live CD.

]]>https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/recovering-grub-the-easy-way/feed/18GRUB2 Bootloader Editor v0.4.5https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/grub2-bootloader-editor-v0-4-5/
https://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/grub2-bootloader-editor-v0-4-5/#commentsFri, 29 Apr 2011 15:31:39 +0000http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/?p=98Continue reading →]]>After about a month, a new version of the GRUB2 Editor is available, offering 2 new cool features:

Remove Old Entries:

Remove Old Entries

If your boot list has grown too big, you now are able to remove old, unneeded entries from the very same UI that you use to manage your GRUB settings. No need to fire up your package manager and search for some weirdly named packages: just select the entries you don’t want and remove them! This feature is still experimental but is known to work smoothly on Kubuntu; other distributions have not been tested yet.

Provide list of valid GRUB resolutions:

Provide list of valid GRUB resolutions

The other cool feature introduced in 0.4.5 is detection of valid GRUB resolutions. To get a list of GRUB supported resolutions for your setup would require to reboot, enter the GRUB command line and type ‘vbeinfo’. Quite nasty compared to launching the GRUB Editor and selecting a resolution, huh? Damn, you will miss all the dirty work.

Other features include the simplification of the default-entry-picking and resolutions-picking UI (as can be seen in the screenshots above), variable substitution using ‘echo’ (Debian/Kubuntu users will no longer see `lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` but the result of this command), a couple of minor fixes in the splash image creation dialog, and last but not least unified save and update actions (you will asked for your password only once when saving – makes more sense).

Don’t forget that packages exist for the following distributions:

Arch Linux

Fedora 14 (Laughlin)

Mandriva 2010.1 (Farman)

openSUSE 11.4

openSUSE Factory

Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

For Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) search for the kde-config-grub2 package in the official universe repository. It may be outdated though, so feel free to use the maverick package.

Primary task of mine is to make interaction with GRUB/GRUB2 as painless as possible for the average user. Occasionally I will fix issues that really bug me or implement features I miss (for KDE), plus other minor contributions.

A bit of history: my first contribution to the open-source community was QGRUBEditor, a Qt GUI to edit GRUB (Legacy) settings. It started as a pet project, mainly to learn the basics of C++ and Qt, but it turned out to be useful to quite some people so after about a year it was discontinued, only to be successfully replaced by KGRUBEditor. After reaching an acceptable stage of maturity, KGRUBEditor was also discontinued, mainly due to me not having enough time to devote to it (exams etc.).

So, after 1-2 years of inactivity, I am back! Mainly working on a KDE GUI tool (it’s a KCModule actually, integrated in System Settings) for editing GRUB2 settings. Named kcm-grub2 it’s home address is on KDE-Apps.org and is also hosted in KDE Playground (edit: KDE Extragear). I also do minor patches for KDE (as you already may have noticed), but I mostly focus on kcm-grub2.

So, that’s it, I’ll keep you informed about any new cool features coming